Little Brains of Clay - Caught in Contemplation

Little Brains of Clay

So. I am updating from a computer in my highly technologically advanced Neuroscience lab (and I do mean that seriously... we are supposed to take pictures of everything we do with 4 megapixel canon G2 digital cameras and then use photoshop to label the pictures and make a brain atlas and all the rest). It's very cool.

Today's exercise was to make models of certain sub-cerebral features of the human and sheep brains, as well as a model of the major arteries serving the brain. What's sad is that in the time it took me to do both a model of the human brain (complete with dentate gyrus, which the professor thought was cool and which my classmates think is really pathetic) and the Circle of Willis -- the name for the collection of major arteries serving the brain, my two groupmates have still not completed a sheep brain. Granted, they did not have an easy 3-D web atlas helping them to piece together their brain and I did, but still.

It's fun though, playing with clay, and I'm learning plenty from it... as annoying as it has been to cut apart many sheep brains and fill them with plastic and model them in clay, I have to say that I will probably never forget brain anatomy, and I'm learning the names and locations of a lot of the nuclei of the thalamus and basal ganglia that I might not have otherwise remembered.

So. Off to photographing brains and hoping the rest of my lab group finishes their brain soon so that I can go home and pack for the weekend and change clothes and race to religion and then head out of town for the weekend!